Posted by John Love, Last modified by John Love on 10 August 2016 03:47 PM

Using Firefox's LiveFeed feature, you can put Moodle news or DL Support articles into your web browser's toolbar, and keep them right at your fingertips.

Many news and information websites use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to syndicate their content for others to republish. This syndication is created as a file called an RSS Feed. Whenever a web page provides an RSS feed of its content, you'll see an icon that looks something like this:

The cool thing about RSS feeds is that they are dynamic - they automatically update themselves from the publisher's site in real-time, whenever something new is added. In other words, if you subscribed to an RSS feed from a news site, the feed would always refresh for you with new information whenever a breaking news story was published. Through RSS, the publisher feeds their updates to you automatically.

You can probably add an RSS feed to most web browsers or email programs to stay current on information from your favourite sites.(For example, Microsoft Outlook can subscribe to RSS feeds.)

In this example, we'll use the Firefox web browser, and its LiveFeed feature.

Get News and Article Feeds from DL Support

DL Support News

The DL Support Online site publishes its news updates here: http://dlsupport.kayako.com/News/List(This news includes Moodle system upgrades, training opportunities, and tips and tricks for Moodle users at VCC.)

DL Support KnowledgeBase Articles

DL Support has written hundreds of how-to articles on using Moodle at VCC. Searching the KnowledgeBase is often better than searching Google for finding answers to VCC-specific Moodle questions.

DLSupport's Kayako online help system automatically provides RSS feeds for lots of content.

So, once you've found a useful RSS feed to subscribe to, how do you add it to your browser?

(Remember, this is for Firefox only. Read on...)

How to Add an RSS Feed to your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar

On the page containing the RSS feed you want to add, click the RSS icon:

The following page will appear. Make sure the option "Subscribe to this feed using Live Bookmarks" is selected, and then click "Subscribe Now".

In the dialog window that appears, you should edit the Name to be more descriptive:Also, make sure "Folder" is set to "Bookmarks Toolbar", so the feed will be located in your browser's toolbar.

Once you've done that, click "Subscribe" to add it to your browser.

Now, your browser's bookmarks toolbar has a new drop-down folder, containing links to all the items published by the RSS feed.(If you can't see the Bookmarks Toolbar, you can turn it on in Firefox's View menu.)